EDGEGEN: Improving Tool-Calling Agents Beyond Happy Paths with Synthetic Edge Case Generation
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents also fits: Tool learning and function calling
Abstract (arXiv)
Tool-calling LLM agents are increasingly deployed in enterprise applications. However, effective evaluation and optimization require high-quality, diverse task datasets that are often difficult to obtain due to privacy and other constraints. Existing synthetic task generation methods often produce generic tasks that ignore an agent's underlying state or database and fail to reflect real-world usage diversity. We propose EdgeGen, a synthetic task generation framework that extracts compliance rules from an agent's specification and uses them to generate database-grounded edge-case tasks designed to violate these rules. When combined with existing synthetic data generation techniques, EdgeGen enables agent improvement through finetuning and harness optimization. The resulting pipeline forms a fully automated closed-loop system that requires no human annotation. Finetuning on data generated by EdgeGen yields a consistent mean progress improvement of 2 percent to 42 percent on tau2bench airline domain, while other baseline methods show degradation for some models. On the other hand, for harness optimization, our method shows a mean progress improvement of 10 percent and 30 percent over the human-curated and base harnesses, respectively, for the Gemma-4-e4b model.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2026.
Builds on
21 of 30 references.
References · 21
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
- 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,674
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
- 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,302
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
- 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 574
- 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
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- 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
- 2024AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-turn LLM Agentscited by 319
- 2025Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agentscited by 294
- 2023MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedbackcited by 293
9 more
- 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agentscited by 280
- 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 248
- 2024APIGen: Automated Pipeline for Generating Verifiable and Diverse Function-Calling Datasetscited by 188
- 2025APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplaycited by 158
- 2023TaskBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Task Automationcited by 138
- 2025Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agentscited by 103
- 2024AGILE: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Framework of LLM Agentscited by 45
- 2025Towards Reliable Benchmarking: A Contamination Free, Controllable Evaluation Framework for Multi-step LLM Function Callingcited by 13
- 2026Talk, Evaluate, Diagnose: User-aware Agent Evaluation with Automated Error Analysiscited by 5
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- 2026EnvFactory: Scaling Tool-Use Agents via Executable Environments Synthesis and Robust RL
- 2025Close the Loop: Synthesizing Infinite Tool-Use Data via Multi-Agent Role-Playing
- 2026AgentJudgeBench: A Multi-Difficulty Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Judges on Agentic Tool-Calling
- 2026Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents
- 2026E-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Step Tool-Use Agents in Real-World Product Scenarios